11 Indian Parliament Members Expelled After Bribe Sting on TV

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: December 24, 2005

The Indian Parliament, no stranger to accusations of graft, on Friday took the highly unusual step of expelling 11 of its members over a televised expos?f corruption.

It was believed to be the largest dismissal of legislators since independence in 1947. The last time a lawmaker was expelled was in 1951.

The dismissal of 10 lawmakers from the lower house and one from the upper house came barely a week after a television news program caught them on tape accepting wads of cash in exchange for asking questions in Parliament. The sting was carried out by television journalists wearing wigs to disguise themselves.

Of the 11 lawmakers, a majority belonged to the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which had once campaigned against the Congress Party on a good-government platform. The opposition walked out of Parliament on Friday, calling the expulsions excessive.

Whether the expulsions will have any impact on the business of the world's largest parliamentary democracy or whether they will simply prompt lawmakers to conduct themselves more discreetly is not known. Certainly, the speed with which Parliament moved against its own members surprised political analysts in this country. It also testified to the power of television news in India, where competition among private news channels has heightened the popularity of sting operations.

''It's significant because members would be more careful and conscious of their conduct in the future,'' said Subhash Kashyap, a former secretary general of the lower house of Parliament. ''It would be a wake-up call.''

It is not the first time India's political establishment has been tainted by allegations of corruption. The then-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, on the heels of a similar television expos?came under a harsh spotlight in 2001 when senior politicians were accused of accepting bribes for supporting defense deals. The Congress Party was named in the United Nations report on the Iraq oil-for-food scandal, resulting in the resignation of a veteran Congress Party politician and foreign minister, Natwar Singh.

In the 1951 expulsion of a member of Parliament, a member of the lower house from the governing Congress Party was expelled for accepting a bribe from the gold bullion lobby. The country's founding prime minister and Congress Party chief then, Jawaharlal Nehru, made the motion for the discharge, Mr. Kashyap recalled.

Attempts to pass anticorruption legislation have failed for more than three decades. Political analysts were loath to vest too much hope in Parliament's verdict this week.

''What is extraordinary is that they were caught, and for a change Parliament seems to be acting swiftly about it,'' said Yogendra Yadav, an analyst with the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, a research group in India. ''It can become the beginning of a change. You never know.''